I totally agree that a good manager who manages team chemistry can make a championship team out of mediocre players. But how on earth would one measure that?
For shits and giggles, I decided to do a regression analysis on each year - money spent versus points earned. No surprise here to note the results were extremely weak. How weak, R-squares ranged from .05 to .11 for each of the three years (that is, salary expenditures only explained 5 to 11% of the point totals). Even worse, there was a negative relationship in 2007 and 2008. In other words, the regression analysis showed that the more money MLS clubs spent, the less points they would be predicted to earn. That looked almost entirely due to the Galaxy. After looking at the numbers and checking for outliers, I'm pretty well convinced there was absolutely NO relationship between points and money spent. In 2009, there is a weak, but notable logical relationship. But MLS is no where near having superclubs. NOT EVEN CLOSE.
Superclubs are undesirable for sure. But a bad precedent is being set when the situation is one where the more you spend the worse off you are. Next question that arises is to see whether winning increases the bottom line. The league is over-regulated imo. The individual teams and players need more freedom.